LIKE MANY READERS, I love newspapers.
Or at least, I love the idea of newspapers.
But they’re an institution in decline, no matter what the short-term profit statements of the big paper chains might currently say.
Most towns today have only one daily. Most of these papers are tired, formulaic sheets, whose contents vary only slightly: Mayhem-and-disaster front pages, mealy-mouthed “analysis” stories, smarmy “human interest” features, celebrity gossip about already-washed-up movie stars, “humor” columns about everything that’s wrong with everybody younger than the writer, pro-Chamber-of-Commerce editorials, and Dilbert.
Total circulation hasn’t kept up with population growth for decades. As the Net siphons off both info-seekers and ad revenues, even a local-monopoly paper may soon cease to be reliably profitable.
Also, the newspaper industry is notoriously resistant to innovation. USA Today, that now familiar package of mostly-blase content with slick graphics, is still thought by many old-line publishers and editors as a pesky radical upstart.
Something new is needed, and the established newspaper biz doesn’t know how to provide it.
But I think I do.
Herewith, my formula for a new newspaper:
- It will be sold to investors as a website with a print presence, rather than a paper publication with a promotional website. This is partly to attract the venture-capital investors who only care about dot-com business ideas, and partly to reflect the changing ways info is disseminated and consumed.
- It will be an all-day news operation. The website will offer continually updated news items and links, some with audio and video. The print paper will be capable of putting out afternoon street extras.
- The print edition will be a free tabloid, five mornings a week. Thus, it will avoid competing for “paid” circulation with its town’s entrenched monopoly daily.
- It will be small, like the Christian Science Monitor, the International Herald Tribune, or Britain’s mid-market tabloids such as the Evening Standard. Maybe only 24 to 28 tab-sized pages, not counting ads.
- It will be concise and selective. Quick-read summaries of the day’s top news; original columns and background pieces explaining the issues behind the headlines; provocative “water-cooler discussion” feature stories; entertainment features aimed at a younger, more urbane niche than the subdivision-centric lifestyle sections of most dailies. Fewer sports stats and stock listings (you can, or will soon be able to, get those more effectively online).
- Its staff will be relatively small and will be mainly divided into two teams: summary people who assemble the news briefs for the print edition and the spot-news items for the website, and longer-story people (some of them freelancers) who write and edit the background and opinion pieces and the columns.
- It will promote its web site as the place to find the detailed coverage left out of the print edition, and as an overall community-portal site with plenty of calendar listings, entertainment reviews, local sports and business stuff, political access info, etc. etc.
- It will look like a newspaper, not like a magazine on newsprint. It will champion all the classic newspaper design elements–tightly-cropped pix, small type, brash headlines–like no current U.S. paper does (except maybe the Daily Racing Form). It will eschew the white-space sprawl look that makes so many suburban dailies look even duller than they are.
- Its writing will be crisp and to-the-point. A story about politicians trying to change garbage regulations, for instance, will start out with the statement that politicians are trying to change garbage regulations–not with the personality profile of a garbage driver whose daily routine would change.
- It won’t try to be everything for everybody. Both the paper and website sides of the operation will service specific niches in the populace: Urban, urbane, young-adult to early-middle-age, people involved in their communities (or wish they were). By focusing on the urban side of its metro area, it could perhaps complement suburban dailies in providing an editorial and ad-sales alternative to one big region-wide paper.
(If you try to start such a paper yourself, please offer me a job.)
MONDAY: Looking backward at Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward.
ELSEWHERE:
